Carbonite Online Backup review

Having played a key role in popularising online backup services, Carbonite has remained competitive while still retaining its signature ease of use. For a while, close rival Mozy had stolen a march with features such as bit-by-bit incremental backup and file archives with versioning, but Carbonite 3.5 took care of these shortfalls and added an easy way of migrating backups from one PC to another.

The trick to the service's usability is its hand-holding approach and close integration with Windows. Navigate through your files and folders as normal, and a simple system of coloured dots and rings shows which are protected and which are pending backup. To add or remove a file or folder to or from the backup, you just right-click on it, select Carbonite then choose the appropriate action. To restore, you access the online store like any other drive in My Computer, browse and select what you want restored. It's so easy you barely need to think about it.

There are some minor downsides, however. First, while the initial backup was fast, with some clever bandwidth-throttling and CPU-prioritising features, the restore speed is unimpressive.

Second, its continuous backup system doesn't really back up on-the-fly. If you've already backed up a file that day, you may have to wait between three and eight hours for changes to be carried across, although you can select a new backup manually with a single right-click. We also experienced a quirk where files in our music folder weren't backed up initially, and we had to right-click on one MP3 track and select "backup all files of this type" before it was rectified.

Carbonite uses SSL encryption for file transfer and proprietary 1,024-bit encryption and a 448-bit Blowfish cypher to safeguard data while in storage at the company's secure Massachusetts datacenter. Users can now also hold their own encryption keys, so no-one else can view backed up data.

Some more advanced users may prefer the greater configuration and control provided by Mozy, but if you're backing up more than 2GB of data and don't want to become too involved in how it's done, Carbonite remains our online backup service of choice.

Author: Stuart Andrews